


Color Photography in Amestris

by quae_bookmarks



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alchemy, Essay, Gen, History of photography, Meta, Non-narrative, Photography, Worldbuilding Analysis, some of my headcanons about Hughes and Pinako but not sure if they merit a character tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-13 22:54:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28911174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quae_bookmarks/pseuds/quae_bookmarks
Summary: A very brief overview of the technological development of color photography and how it might have happened in Amestris.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4
Collections: Secret Snipers Exchange 2020





	Color Photography in Amestris

**Author's Note:**

  * For [teacuptaako](https://archiveofourown.org/users/teacuptaako/gifts).



Amestris has color photography, as seen in Pinako’s corkboard and Hughes’ photo collection. For a story that takes a rather scattershot approach to historical inspiration, drawing on fashion, architecture, and technology from turn of the 20th century up through WWII, this is not implausible. (In real life, commercially available color photography predated tanks and portable radios like those seen during the coup on the Promised Day, for example.) But I wanted to take a more in depth look at the technological development of color photography in the real world and speculate about it’s development in Amestris, in particular whether alchemy might have helped in its invention or led to earlier and more widespread availability for ordinary people.

First, a brief overview of the development of color photography in the real world. People began figuring out color photography pretty much simultaneously with figuring out the physics of colored light and human perception of color. In fact, James Maxwell (of Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism fame) was the person who both [proved three-color theory for vision in 1857 and made the first durable color photograph in 1861](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clerk_Maxwell#Colour_vision).1 Approaches to color photography can be divided into two broad categories: additive color processes, in which light is passed through colored filters, adding up to a fully colored image, and subtractive color processes, in which colored inks, reflecting specific colors (subtracting the rest) and are combined to create a full-color positive image. The latter methods allowed for reproduction of color photographs on paper like we see in the shows and manga.

Additive processes were commercially available as early as the 1900s, such as [the Autochrome Lumière in 1907](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autochrome_Lumi%C3%A8re). These tended to require specialized equipment both to produce and view the final images. For example Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky’s amazing color photographs produced on his 1909-1915 tours of the Russian Empire, he brought along a whole train car of equipment to take and develop pictures. 2 Subtractive technology was developed on roughly the same timeline but took longer to become commercially available. For example [tricolor carbro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_print) processes were first developed in the late 19th century but didn't see popular use until the 1920s and 30s. [Kodachrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodachrome) dates from 1935.

Could alchemy have made these processes more available to ordinary citizens? I think it’s plausible. Additive technology such as the Joly Process or the Autochrome Lumièr relied on carefully prepared glass plates with filter features on the length scale of 100 down to 5 microns. We don’t see any evidence in FMA that alchemy can do detail work on that scale, but I think that magic which reconstructs matter at the molecular if not subatomic level can do detail work on the level of microns! On the subtractive process side, colored prints were finicky to produce and assemble, so much so that they were basically out of reach for amateurs until the advent of Kodachrome in the late 1930s. I think it’s possible that alchemy could synthesize the film, and the chemicals to process it, and the matrix holding it together. Even if direct alchemy was required for some of these steps, a company could sell film that had to be sent back and developed in-house, much like camera film was handled in the real world for most of the 20th century.

(It also depends on whether alchemy is widespread enough that people are using it for industrial processes. Again, we don’t see any evidence of that in the story, but the Elrics run into people with a bit of alchemy training—such as Mr. Halling in Youswell and the non-state alchemists who helped repair the parts of Central City destroyed by Scar—often enough that I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to imagine some alchemist might set up a photography company.)

We don’t see much in the way of cameras or developing equipment in story. The only camera I found depicted in the manga is the one used to take the Elric family portrait in Ch.68, and that’s a large tripod camera operated by a professional photographer. Still, given the volume and casual nature of the photographs we see in the show, I like to think Hughes and probably Pinako are amateur photographers. As a high ranking military officer and a nationally renowned craftswoman and business owner respectively, they would both have the budget to afford the hobby even if it was as expensive and difficult as in the real world. It’s nice to imagine them taking photos of their families.

I’m not really sure how to end this essay, so I’ll just say I hope it was interesting and if you want learn more about color photography I learned most of the non-anime stuff discussed here from [this excellent article](https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/a-short-history-of-colour-photography/).

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Yeah that's right I'm linking to wikipedia, this is for fandom *shrug*. If you want more reputable sources though I might be willing to help research, I guess ask in the comments.   
>  2\. Much of Prokudin-Gorsky's collection has been preserved by the US Library of Congress. For a nice gallery of cleaned up images try [this gallery](https://imgur.com/gallery/ueKiVDp), or for a more complete gallery with metadata see [here](https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/prok/item/2018678758/).
> 
> A gift for teacuptaako for the Secret Snipers 2020 Gift Exchange. Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
